


Brother of my Soul

by Kaerith



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Betrayal, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Whump, M/M, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:41:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27797122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaerith/pseuds/Kaerith
Summary: Book can feel the tidal wave of whatever spur-of-the-moment sermon Joe is about to unleash. Joe has an intense presence when he sharpens his focus, and he can make the expectation of his impending lecture just...loomin the air for entire seconds.The weight of what is inevitably to come presses down on Booker's sorry heart and tears spring to his eyes because everything Joe is about to say, with a confidence that will bare his gentle and beautiful soul to these empty-eyed and hard-hearted mercenaries... every word will be spoken with Joe's fervent belief and be woven with poetic beauty and it will be moving and breathtaking.And Booker-- who he is and what he has done-- will render every syllable of that speech false.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 26
Kudos: 110





	Brother of my Soul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spokenitalics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spokenitalics/gifts).



> Inspired by spokenitalics' Tumblr post imagining an AU where Joe gives The Van Speech but it is to Booker.
> 
> **Trigger warnings for graphic violence.** Also, if you are sensitive to historical war scenes (use of chemical weapons and concentration camps), please exercise caution in reading the italicized segments.

_This is wrong,_ Booker thinks. He had two more days-- he was supposed to have _two more days._ That had been the agreement he and Copley had made after the showdown in Sudan. Instead, Booker is coming back to consciousness (this death should have taken longer to revive from-- the entire front of his chest and stomach is a disgusting and agonizing mess) with Joe calling his name and half a dozen raid units pointing their guns at them. 

"Where are we? What happened?" Booker mumbles in French, more to himself than to anyone else. 

Joe lurches towards Booker and one of the soldiers pulls him back. "I need to see if he's okay," Joe insists, wrenching away and falling to his knees next to Book, who has to stifle a chuckle because _obviously he is very not okay._ Joe's wrists are ziptied together as he puts a hand on Booker's shoulder. "Armoured van," he says. "Ambush at the safe house. Looks like they got both of us," Joe adds, and that information gives Booker a sense of overwhelming relief as well as dread. Andy, Nile, and Nicky may still be free; that makes Booker very relieved. But that means Nicky is going to be determined to rescue Joe and he will be vengeance personified. Nicky will be furious and it will be a cold and calculating thing. He will not only track Joe down to rescue him-- he will dig to the root of the plot with a single-minded rage to remove every threat to Joe's safety. Nicky will uncover the entire conspiracy, though torture or more subtle means, and figure out Booker's betrayal. Book goes cold at the knowledge that everything will be exposed. Kidnapping Joe hadn't been part of Booker's plan, but his actions had led to this moment. 

"Are you alright?" Joe asks, his voice and hand warm, and Booker feels lower than dirt. 

"What, is he your boyfriend?" One of the goons snarks, making a couple of the others snicker. 

"You are an infant," Joe says, and Book can feel the tidal wave of whatever spur-of-the-moment sermon Joe is about to unleash. Joe has an intense presence when he sharpens his focus, and he can make the expectation of his impending lecture just... _loom_ in the air for entire seconds. 

The weight of what is inevitably to come presses down on Booker's sorry heart and tears spring to his eyes because everything Joe is about to say, with a confidence that will bare his gentle and beautiful soul to these empty-eyed and hard-hearted mercenaries... every word will be spoken with Joe's fervent belief and be woven with poetic beauty and it will be moving and breathtaking. 

And Booker-- who he is and what he has done-- will render every syllable of that speech false. 

"He’s not my boyfriend, though the strength of our love for each other could rival any romantic bond you children could imagine. This man is more to me than you can dream," Joe says, only getting started, and Booker wishes he could drop through the floor. 

"When all else is lost, he is a raft in a stormy sea." 

_They had all been friendly when they found Booker (Sebastien, as he had been called, then), but Joseph had been the warmest. Not only metaphorically, but literally, too: whether Sebastien had been shaking with the cold or with the fear of this new unknown, Joseph had been the one to wrap his arms around him and soothe the shivers away. Andrea had taken the longest to earn a rapport with, and Sebastien had grown closer to her once he realized that Joseph and Nicholas were together. But in those first weeks Joseph had been the one to stick by Sebastien's side night and day. After Sebastien had made it to civilization he had turned on them; Andrea had been adamant about him leaving his old life behind and had threatened to keep him prisoner until he came to his senses. With hindsight, Booker could understand that she had been afraid that a criminal and deserter would reveal their existence to someone. Joseph had been the one to press a wad of folded money into Sebastien's hand and give him a parting embrace and tell him that they would check in on him in his hometown in five years or so. Joseph had understood that to Sebastien his family had been everything, and this new immortality couldn't erase that need to return to that touchstone._

"The touch of his hand on my shoulder holds me together when I am falling apart." 

_Nicky had been still using the proper name of Nicholas when they had waded into the muddy morass of the Great War. That conflict was a turning point: the mass-production of guns and bombs allowed enemies to slaughter each other by the hundreds. The chlorine gas that had been used by the Germans had crept over the terrain, a spreading cloud of death with leaves turning yellow and the grass blades going black. Birds, rats, and even the dark buzzing flies seized and dropped to the ground. Gas-masks had not been widely supplied at first, and men were wrapping their faces in whatever cloth they had to spare. Sebastien didn't even have any water at hand to dampen his undershirt and had been too terrified to be able to piss onto it like Andy had suggested. By the time the Germans swarmed into the trenches most of the Allied troops were incapacitated. Sebastien was too preoccupied with coughing up bits of his lungs to join Andy and Joseph as they fought, easily holding off the enemies and letting their bodies pile up in the narrow tunnel. Nicholas had retrieved gas masks from the dead Germans and had put one on Sebastien before he pulled a mask on himself. He had held Sebastien's hand even as their flesh sloughed off from the acid made from the chlorine and their own body fluids. All four of them had looked like nightmares-- Joseph and Andrea had been flayed and bloodied moving corpses whose mere appearance was enough to make the enemy forces scream and flee in terror, and Nicholas had steadied Sebastien with his hand and his presence as they had both wept painfully at the cruelties humanity was only becoming more adept at creating._

"His intelligence has unraveled the plots of tyrants to free countless innocents." 

_Buchenwald had been a cold place of hunger and despair. Booker had not known what he had volunteered for until he was there, inside the razor wire compound, and learned how brutal and indifferent the systematic extermination of human beings could be. It was his first experience of trying to fight against an enormous, faceless, bloodless bureaucracy. Booker was alone and charged with forming a resistance movement with the short-term goal of saving lives and the long-term one of providing intelligence to the outside and ultimately arranging a simultaneous attack on the SS from both outside and inside the camp. The population of prisoners was a heterogeneous one: criminals and political prisoners of various languages and nationalities. Booker had not wanted to be the spearhead of the movement, but he whispered words in a handful of tongues to the individuals who held the most influence and encouraged the growth of a cell of clever and courageous men. His manipulation had extended to the guards, and he had acquired the materials for a Polish engineer to build a miniscule electricity generator and a short-wave radio that had allowed them to contact US forces. The inmates had been stockpiling weapons for over two years, and the message from the American Army had incited enough momentum for them to rise against the guards and stand proudly when the liberation troops arrived. Joe, Nicky, and even Andy had been able to disguise themselves themselves as American infantry and as soon as he recognized their faces Booker had felt the weight of responsibility and terror finally lift, leaving him feeling as weak and hollow as he had probably looked._

"This man knows me and has defended me for more than five times the span of your pathetic lifetime." 

_Sebastien had thought that Joseph and Nicholas' relationship had been a mere convenience at first. As the two men had grown more accustomed to him, though, they began to drop the facade of conventional and respectable distance. Sebastien began to witness their exchanges of fond and heated looks. Their hands began to touch and clasp together. They would discreetly disappear into a separate bedroom for a night, leaving Sebastien with Andrea who would just raise an eyebrow in a silent challenge to see if he would object. He had thought they were just partners of convenience for years, until Joseph had joined Sebastien for a cigarette one rainy afternoon. "Nicolò no longer doubts or fears our feelings for each other," Joseph had said apropos of nothing. "But I miss his unrestrained expressions of love. Your uneasiness and ignorance need to be dealt with." Sebastien had been taken aback by Joseph's blatant approach to the topic. He had reluctantly said, "I know men can be partners in sex. Can they actually have love that only those in marriages possess?" Joseph had caught his eye and grinned. "We have been married. Three different rituals over the centuries. There have been no others, man or woman, who have shaken my devotion to him. Nor his to me. We have an abundance of passion, as well. We have only been polite in hiding it for your sake." Hundreds of years; Sebastien could hardly conceive of that. Passion, too. He and his lost wife had enjoyed that before it had waned over time, forged into a comfortable and dutiful kind of love that endured difficulties and children. Joseph had finished smoking with a flourish of a gesture to stub out the last of his cigarette. "You are our brother, now. We will no longer tiptoe around your delicate sensibilities," he had said, a tease with an implied threat of an older brother that would smack you if you dared disagree to his choices. After that all propriety had fallen away between Nicholas and Joseph, and Sebastien had learned the signs of strong, true, and abiding love. There was softness toward each other and a fierceness toward the world. They had to defend themselves so many times. Once Sebastien had seen how his new brothers fit together he had also defended them against the slurs and violence of the close-minded. It seemed no open society in the world would accept two men so entwined. Sebastien had learned how to appreciate Berlin in the all too-brief era of the Weimar Republic and then tolerate the mob-run joints in New York where homosexuals were able to congregate until the crackdowns in the '60s. After that was Stonewall and the birth of a visible and international gay rights movement, and Booker had followed the news with a vicarious excitement and longing for Joe and Nicky to be able to be fully themselves._

"He is not my boyfriend," Joe says. "We have fought beside each other, bled for each other, and died for each other. Our bond is not something made simply by an accident of genetics; we have chosen each other thousands upon thousands of times. I pity your fear and your ignorance that you will never know a connection to a brother of your soul. He is not a mere friend or a comrade or a brother. He is all that and more." 

Booker thinks that is the end of his speech, but then Joe pulls out one last sentence while his hand still rests softly on Booker's piece-of-shit shoulder. 

"My _boyfriend_ , however, will hunt us down and tear you apart while you are still screaming to rescue us." 

Booker has a moment of silence to feel lower than dirt. To reflect on his betrayal. And then the van lurches. 

"A flat tire," Joe says to the soldiers in a tone devoid of fear or glee. "Wonder what caused that." There's also no hint of surprise or alarm in his eyes, but Booker can see the slightest bit of a smirk at the left corner of his mouth. Guards haul them apart. 

The van must be dual rear wheeled, because after that one lurch the ride smooths out. Nicky (because of course it must be Nicky) must have not had time to get off another shot. At least not right away; perhaps he was barreling after them in a car with Andy and the next attack would happen at any moment. 

Booker's chest wall and muscles have mostly repaired but he wishes that his lungs were still exposed. That he could spit something at one of these douchebag soldiers that would earn him a kick to his vulnerable organs that would kill him again, just for a reprieve from his guilt. He is a traitor and a rat. Blind in his selfishness. He had thought that Sudan would be enough, that Copley's contacts would have been able to harvest enough blood and tissue samples to reverse his life sentence. When that had failed, he had told Copley he would take himself in. He had two days until he did it; two days to make them understand and agree to leave him behind and promise not to search for him. Copley and his partners obviously decided that they weren't going to wait for Booker when they could strike and go for getting all four of them. 

And Nile. _Merde,_ the new kid doesn't deserve any of this! Book closed his eyes. Joe, Andy, and Nicky didn't deserve this, either. 

He believes that it must have been an RPG that blasted the van, because when Booker opens his eyes next he's deaf and sixty feet away from the flaming, noxious-smelling, shattered pieces of the vehicle. Half of his body is burned and the other half feels beaten and fractured. It's a bitch to draw every breath, but his stubborn body keeps doing it anyway until a change in the wind makes him cough and gag from the smoke. 

He doesn't know who is coming near, can't hear anything except a faint ringing, but he does sense the approaching footsteps. Someone rolls him over onto his back and he recognizes Andy's face, white in the night. She's saying something: probably a dry-voiced, insulting bon mot that Booker would really only appreciate if he hadn't been blown up twice in the span of one or two hours. He flips her off and points to one ear, not even daring to try speaking. His breath still seizes in his throat and every cough wracks through his decimated torso, and it probably isn't the worst death he has come back from but he can't recall any others at this moment. 

Nile squats down next to Andy, and Booker tries to say, "Joe," but can't hear himself and doesn't know if he was successful. Neither woman responds, anyway. They haul him up and fold him into a car. Joe gets in a moment later and clasps Booker's hand, and Book closes his eyes but can feel the rocking of the car as Nicky gets in and slams the door before Andy puts it in gear and they start moving. 

When his eardrums finally heal, he can appreciate the fraught silence between the five of them. The tension plays on his nerves like a bow across catgut. "My fault," he is finally able to rasp out. He barrels on, his stomach a heavy mass of dread and guilty sickness, like a tumor he has been nurturing until it is the size of a _pamplemousse,_ vomiting out his pathetic deeds and excuses in as few words as he can. "Leave me," he says, "shove me out of the car. They'll find me before I heal. You can leave and they won't have any idea where you've gone. I won't be able to tell them anything." His arms don't work right, still; otherwise he would be opening the door himself and toppling out. 

He must have lapsed into French without realizing it, because Nile asks what he's saying. The movement of the car is making him dizzy and Booker hasn't bothered to open his eyes, and he lets the sounds of their conversation just wash around him without putting any effort into understanding it. Joe is still pressed up next to him, their fingers still interlaced, and Book is both surprised and not that the man hasn't pulled away. The guilt and relief fight within him; if the weakness of his body wasn't so overwhelming, the opposing urges to cling to Joe and shrink away from him would be more important. As it is, he is just too exhausted and wrung-out to do anything but sit there, head and shoulders slumped against the seatback and window, his hair getting caught in the seatbelt mechanism, and lets the world just kind of gray out til it's gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Choose your own ending?
> 
> A. 100 Years of Exile- maybe with Quynh teaser scene, maybe not  
> B. Big Brother House- Everyone is mad but they all keep Booker with them because they are also aware of how he is hurting and sorry and needs love (my favorite)  
> C. Bye-Bye Book- they toss him out of the car where he is found by Merrick  
> D. Bye-Bye Book 2 (the squeakquel)- Booker gets tossed out of the car but heals and gets away OR he is captured by Merrick and manages to facilitate his own escape from the lab  
> E. Booker's Final Death (dramatic, just like him, but I hate it 😭)
> 
> I'm not going to write any of these, but anyone is welcome to.


End file.
